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SmartAboutThings writes "After discounting the Surface RT tablet worldwide by 30 percent, Microsoft is now cutting the price of its Surface Pro tablet by one hundred dollars. Steve Ballmer himself has recently declared that he was unhappy with the number of tablets Microsoft has managed to sell. The price cut offer is valid between August 4th and August 29th. It might continue or stop, according to the supply. The price cut is applicable to Surface Pro 64 GB & 128 GB models."

At that price, the Surface Pro is more or less even with the Wacom stylus-input displays (of similar size, larger ones are substantially more expensive) that don't have a computer attached to them...

Unless the pen input is totally gimped, this seems like it would be a serious competitor to those for everyone except people whose photoshopping is serious enough that the Surface's specs can't handle it. Especially if your demands are at all mobile, it's hard to justify buying the Wacom when you could get the screen and stylus input with the laptop thrown in for free. It's a pity that the Surface can't act as a monitor/input device (optionally, while charging at your desk, for example, it could go from a waste of space to an extra monitor) for more powerful computers.

Little third-party developer support? You must live in some fantasy world where Windows 95-Windows 8 never existed. A tablet that runs every 32-bit (and 64-bit) application ever written for the world's most popular OS since the mid-90's does not have "little third party developer support".

Much ink has been spilled about the failure of the unloved RT model...One that other than it being severely crippled with Secure Boot was ARM, something I liked a lot...the pro has a fan! I don't see what is compelling about another Windows 8 Ultrabook (Pen input aside...that is great)

What we do know is that the $900m writedown was related to Surface RT only, but the $853m revenue figure includes sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro combined. Microsoft upped its sales and marketing budget for the Windows Division in 2013 by a jaw-dropping $1bn, which included an $898m increase in advertising costs "associated primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.

The pen makes it absolutely worth it. It's a professional Wacom digitizer pen with 1024 levels of sensitivity. Drawing right on the tablet screen is awesome. The pen also works with desktop apps like Illustrator, Photoshop, SketchPad Pro, etc.

Congratulations, you've won the bronze in the "Miss the fucking point completely" competition!

Hint: most desktop apps from "most supported platform on the planet" are mostly useless when running on small touchscreen. There's a reason tablet computers didn't really catch on until iOS - and not for the lack of tablets with "most supported platform on the planet". There was even Windows XP Tablet Edition, which still didn't help a bit.

It's a shitty tablet: low res screen, a ridiculously short battery life, with just as little tablet useful and good quality apps (they're the same ones as Windows RT) i.e. apps with a touch UI, to most people, to a lot of people, being a "standard x86 computer" (but with touch) also means dealing with the problems they've had for years with their Windows PCs (malware and what not). The OS takes far too much of the SSD, and it's bloody overpriced compared to an ipad. It just doesn't have any advantages at being a tablet over iPads or Android-based tablets.

It's a shitty laptop: the overpriced keyboard sucks, the screen is too damn tiny (and not very high res), the screen angle doesn't adjust well like a laptop, it has less options for connecting it. Want to plug it to this external display or an ethernet port? That requires a proprietary overpriced cable!

For the price of a Surface Pro with the keyboard cover and the necessary cables, I can get an ipad that's a far better tablet in every way, and a "good enough" laptop (better than a Surface Pro at anything I'll do on it) that'll last me 5 years.

Sure, the Surface Pro "replaces" both but all-around in a very sub-par way, and that's only a real gain if you're travelling. I don't mind leaving the laptop somewhere else in the house if I go read an ebook elsewhere with the ipad, nor that it bothers me to have the ipad lying elsewhere if I'm working on the laptop.

The Surface Pro is truly the worst of both worlds, and it's not exactly cheap either.

It does if your goals are to have a handheld tablet which runs cool, has great battery life, plenty of touch-optimised apps and low OS maintenance requirements.

And that's the problem with both the Surfaces.

The RT is late to the party with several irritations and nothing better to offer than the other tablet OSs, not to mention a lot less apps available. The Pro brings the same old Windows benefits, complexity and issues every other Windows machine brings, but also puts nothing new on the table. Technically there's lots of click-click cleverness and interface bling, but neither enables users to do anything new or better than what's already available.

Microsoft has been trying to do tablets for longer than most companies - I even still have a Compaq Concerto with Pen Windows on it - but they've never managed to give the actual users of the hardware any tangible benefit for the cost or complexity. For users, it's not so much "Where do you want to go today?" as a bewildered "Well, what can I do with this thing now?"

Why was this modded "troll" when in fact the MS camp on/. is obviously trolling:
Look at the scores. Remember that one a few days ago that got a +5 Informative for being an obvious MS Shill?
Some of the trolls language: "DAMN GOOD travel companion", "Drawing right on
the tablet screen IS AWESOME." "it's predecessors were...(AWESOME)...The surface
Pro VASTLY OUTSTRIPS either of those..", " This machine REALLY SHINES with
the Click Keyboard."... Boots in 7 SECONDS FLAT.
And its PERFORMANCE is AMAZING, and the
interface is WELL THOUGHT OUT". I could go on. Include any of those keywords
and automatically get 1 mod point for at least 2. An army of moderators needs to go
out and downgrade these unworthy posts about Microsoft or it's products, changing points on some of these clowns'
postings, some of which are from people who post like 5 or more times each. Are we living
in a world where talk is cheap and we can just use ultra-positive words without
giving actual evidence as to _how_ the product is great. Go back to English 101. Explain your point and develop an argument. Shame on these
moderators!

The main draw for me to my Surface Pro was the power. I was using a Lenovo S10e for most of my work tasks and while it worked ok, it didn't have enough power to do heavy lifting tasks like Virtual Machines or PC games well. As a subnotebook replacement, the Surface Pro is one of the best if not the best option out there. As a tablet, not so much.

That being said, my Nexus 7 is a much better tablet. If I want to browse the web or check email, the N7 is much better than the SP for that. For occasional tablet use the SP isn't bad but the SP's weight vs the N7 is very noticeable. Battery Life vs the SP is no contest either. The N7 destroys both Surface systems there, But I'm not going to be playing TF2 or running My DEV VM on my N7 anytime soon.

The biggest problem that Microsoft faces when it comes to the Surface is the RT models. They seriously need to revamp RT to be DEV Friendly or EOL it right now. If MS focused strictly on the Surface Pro's from the beginning instead of doing the typical Balmeresque halfassing strategy they've done with just about everything coming out of Redmond the last two years by trying to compete against IPad like just about every failed tablet manufacturer out there then maybe they wouldn't be sitting on a crap ton of money wasting in a warehouse.